He moved his head uncomfortably, burrowed his ear deeper into his biceps. That damned keening! He shifted restlessly, stopped his exposed ear with his other hand. That movement racked the beaten ribs, but the shrilling, soft and remorseless, kept on. It was enough to drive a man mad! It was—
He sat bolt upright, eyes flaring angrily. That was what Woller had planned!
It was torture—subtle, undramatic, simple. But pure, horrid torture.
Nolan's face was gray with strain. It was incredible that a sound, a noise, could become a threat. He'd heard the same sound a million times before, though never at such close range, or from such titanic generators. But now—
He began trying to fill his mind with other things, but there was no room for thought in a brain that was brimming with naked sound. Snatches of school-days poetry, long columns of multiplication tables—They jumbled in his brain. The lines ran together and muddled, were drowned out by the wail of the generators. He gave up and sat there, forcing himself to be still, while the sound hovered in the atmosphere all around him, his jaw muscles taut enough to bite through steel, a great pulse pounding in his temples....
Flesh could stand only so much. After a while—he didn't know when—he was mercifully unconscious.
A volcano erupted under him and awoke. His whole body was a mass of flame now, head throbbing like the jets of a twenty-ton freight skid, chest and ribs as sore as though they were flayed. A sickening weight held him crushed against the metal floor.
The roaring from without was the sound of the rockets, loud enough to drown out the whine that had nearly killed him. The ship was landing. And at once there was a gentle jar, then a dizzying vertigo as the grav-web was cut off abruptly. The rockets died down and were silent.
Everything was silent. The change was fantastic, a dream. Nolan, lying there, thought the silence was the finest thing he had ever heard.